Whether you’re into runways, textiles, history or immersive art, four major exhibitions this season will shape how you see fashion and art—not as separate worlds, but as overlapping lenses through which we understand identity, culture and expression.
Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life
Hayward Gallery
February 17, 2026 – May 3, 2026
This spring, London’s art scene provides space for thought, emotion and physical sensation with Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life at the Hayward Gallery. It’s a show that feels like walking through a memory rather than browsing a gallery.
Shiota, a Japanese artist known for her immersive installations of thread, objects and personal detritus, fills the Hayward Gallery with expansive, weblike structures that seem to connect everything in their paths. Dresses, keys, chairs and personal possessions with human histories are suspended in dense networks of yarn that activate the space with tension and resonance.
This isn’t an exhibition about fashion in the literal sense, but it’s deeply connected to materials, memory and identity—themes that matter to anyone thinking about what clothes carry beyond fabric and form. A garment isn’t just an outfit; it’s a history, a context, a piece of someone’s life.
Relevant for art and fashion lovers alike, the exhibition stretches the idea of what visual storytelling can be and how everyday materials can hold collective meaning.
Why go? For a visceral, tactile experience that resets how you think about objects, presence and personal narrative.
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art
Victoria and Albert Museum
March 28, 2026 – November 1, 2026
At the heart of London’s fashion programming this spring is Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a major retrospective that zeroes in on one of the 20th century’s most radical designers.
Elsa Schiaparelli isn’t just another name in fashion history. She’s the designer who blurred the boundaries between haute couture and fine art, often working with surrealists like Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau to create garments that felt more like sculptures than clothing.
The V&A exhibition brings together over 200 objects, from garments and accessories to archival sketches and collaborative pieces, exploring how her work contributes to an active dialogue with visual culture.
What makes this show especially exciting is its cross disciplinary scope. You won’t just see dresses and coats; you’ll see the intellectual and artistic currents that shaped them.
The exhibition considers design as an act of thinking, a framework that feels especially relevant in 2026 when conversations about craft, concept and context are more prevalent than ever.
Why go? It’s a reminder that fashion can be as provocative, clever and layered as any painting or sculpture.
NIGO: From Japan with Love
The Design Museum
May 1, 2026 – October 4, 2026
One of the most talked about exhibitions of the year is NIGO: From Japan with Love at The Design Museum, the first major UK retrospective on the Japanese designer and cultural figure NIGO.
This isn’t just a fashion retrospective. It’s a deep dive into how streetwear, global culture and personal memory collide.
NIGO is best known for founding streetwear brand A Bathing Ape (BAPE) in the ’90s and shaping what we now think of as streetwear culture—a fashion language that has influenced music, graphic design, sneakers and high fashion.
The show spans over 700 objects including rare garments, personal collections of vintage pieces and even a recreation of NIGO’s teenage bedroom—a physical reminder that creativity often starts with what inspires you as a child.
There are early BAPE pieces, collaborations with global brands, ceramics hand thrown by NIGO himself and a life-size glass tea house that reflects his interest in traditional Japanese craft and ritual.
What makes this exhibition significant is how it maps the connections between subculture and global fashion. NIGO’s journey shows that design isn’t just about big labels but about curiosity, cross-disciplinary thinking and a personal archive of influences that becomes a signature aesthetic.
Why go? It’s a rare chance to see a living designer’s archive and understand how streetwear became a global language of style, art and identity.
Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait
National Portrait Gallery
June 4, 2026 – September 6, 2026
When we talk about icons, it’s easy to fall into cliché. But Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait at the National Portrait Gallery reframes the familiar through fashion, photography, image making and cultural construction.
This exhibition marks what would have been Monroe’s 100th birthday and gathers portraits by some of the 20th century’s most influential photographers and artists, including Andy Warhol, Cecil Beaton and Marlene Dumas. Rather than simply showing glamorous snapshots, Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait considers how Monroe’s image was crafted, both by herself and the industry around her.
This is an exhibition with narrative layers: the Hollywood dream versus the human behind it, photographic stylization versus lived reality and the ways visual culture constructs a public self. It’s a rare chance to see how portraiture, celebrity and style intersect.
The exhibition also includes personal items and clothing that speak to Monroe’s own sense of identity in a world obsessed with icons. That’s a conversation worth having in 2026, when visual identities online and offline are heavily curated and constantly in flux.
Why go? To see how image and outfit combine to make meaning and how that meaning changes over time.
What These Exhibitions Say About London in 2026
These four exhibitions show that London isn’t afraid to hold complexity at its core.
At the V&A, fashion becomes art not in a metaphorical sense, but in a literal, institutional one. At the Hayward Gallery, material becomes narrative, not just design. At The Design Museum, clothing becomes culture, an amalgamation of an artist’s love of music, dance and art. And at the National Portrait Gallery, image becomes a starting point for thinking about culture, public life and personal identity.
This season’s exhibitions are more than opportunities to see beautiful objects. They are chances to understand why looking at art and fashion matters: because both tell stories about who we are, how we choose to present ourselves and how meaning travels across time and space.
